Antinomian Impulses in the Undergraduate Survey

As anyone who teaches a survey in early American literature can attest, one of the difficulties of the course is conveying to our students our interest in and passion for early American studies. Students often have no background in the texts, history, or culture of the early period. Unlike in courses in later American literature, they cannot readily bring their independent readings to bear on, say, Thomas Morton's New English Canaan or Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Even when they have heard of the authors or events under discussion, they are as likely to mistake anachronistic or contemporary representations for historical context. They know Pocahontas through the Disney movie; they're sure women accused of witchcraft in Salem were ducked and burned (after all, they sculpted a diorama of such trials in their sixth-grade social studies class). I've had students tell me that Olaudah Equiano's narrative was boring because his description of slavery was not as visceral as that of Toni Morrison in Beloved.

This last example aside, most students are interested in hearing the "real" story as conveyed by our big, authoritative anthologies. Nevertheless, few members of my survey class are there by choice. Most take it to fulfill requirements for the major. And it's clear in the first weeks that many students—graduates too!—often cannot fathom why we are so obsessed with pre-1800 materials.¹ I suspect many survey-takers make their way through the course wondering why, if I could have chosen to read and study Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, or Alice Walker (whose works have obvious merit, as my students assure me), a smart woman like me went for Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (never mind the horrors of Cotton Mather and James Fenimore Cooper). This state of affairs continues in such classes until quite late in the semester, when students have a "critical mass" of readings on which to draw. It's only then that we get the "aha!" reaction to Hawthorne's casual reference to Martha Carrier in Young Goodman Brown or to the rhetorical use of anger in both Jonathan Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Frederick Douglass's "Meaning of the Fourth of July."

In short, what students new to early American literature cannot experience for many weeks in the standard survey course—if indeed ever—are the pleasures of intertextuality, the surprises of reading varied and seemingly unrelated texts next to one another to find new connections, and the intellectual satisfaction of constructing literary histories for themselves.²

Recently, I have attempted to provide quite early in the semester some approximation of the kinds of linkages and intertextual reading that teachers hope students will be able to perform on their own by the end of a survey course. For this roundtable, I want to discuss a set of readings with which I have introduced students to the deep delights of early American studies, a three-week unit I call "Antinomian Impulses." My approach to this and each unit in the class is to construct a kind of "core sample" of early American readings. Each unit brings together works written and published from across the time period we study, but in which one text serves as a base. In "Antinomian Impulses," The Scarlet Letter was the anchor for a wide-ranging consideration of the appearance and significance of "antinomianism" in American literature, sparked by Hawthorne's prison-door allusion to Anne Hutchinson. The result was an analysis of "lawlessness," the theology of inner grace, the construction of gender norms, and the assumed primacy of the individual in American literature and culture.

In this unit, the first to follow the introduction to the course, The Scarlet Letter serves as a unifying force—it is the text to which we repeatedly return —but paradoxically it is decentered within the unit as a whole as texts such as the seventeenth-century English author Ephraim Pagitt's Heresiography or Cotton Mather's account of the Antinomian controversy "break into" our Scarlet Letter reading. As students considered the...